This groundbreaking documentary dissects a slanderous aspect of cinematic history that has run virtually unchallenged from the earliest days of silent film to today's biggest Hollywood blockbusters. Featuring acclaimed author Dr. Jack Shaheen, the film explores a long line of…

Named the best documentary film of all time by Sight and Sound, it is presented here in its entirety for the first time since its original premiere. Discovered and restored at EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam--with extensive digital treatment by…

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) contrasts the stillness…

Chris Marker, filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and now videographer and digital multimedia artist, has been challenging moviegoers, philosophers, and himself for years with his complex queries about time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Sans…

Acclaimed director Steve James ( Hoop Dreams ) and executive producer Martin Scorsese ( The Departed ) present LIFE ITSELF, a documentary film that recounts the inspiring and entertaining life of world-renowned film critic and social commentator Roger Ebert -…

Bob Dylan is captured on-screen as he never would be again in this groundbreaking film from D. A. Pennebaker. The legendary documentarian finds Dylan in England during his 1965 tour, which would be his last as an acoustic artist. In…

Trickery. Deceit. Magic. In Orson Welles's free-form documentary F FOR FAKE, the legendary filmmaker (and self-described charlatan) gleefully engages the central preoccupation of his career -- the tenuous line between truth and illusion, art and lies. Beginning with portraits of…

The birthplace of classic anime films such as Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke , Studio Ghibli occupies a near legendary position in film history. Granted unfettered access to the notoriously insular studio, this revealing documentary follows the three…

Meet Big and Little Edie Beale: mother and daughter, high-society dropouts, and reclusive cousins of Jackie Onassis. The two manage to thrive together amid the decay and disorder of their East Hampton, New York, mansion, making for an eerily ramshackle…

Few films can claim as much influence on the course of cinema history as "Chronicle of a Summer". The fascinating result of a collaboration between filmmaker-anthropologist Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin, this vanguard work of what Morin termed "cinema-…

After his girlfriend leaves him, McElwee takes a voyage along the original route followed by General William Sherman - but rather than cutting a swath of destruction designed to force the Confederate South into submission, as Sherman did, McElwee searches…

Lars von Trier now enters the world of documentary filmmaking alongside his idol, Danish filmmaker Jorgen Leth. In 1967, Leth made a 12 minute feature film called The Perfect Human. In the year 2000, von Trier challenged Jorgen Leth to…

A courageous and startling film, Peter Davis's landmark documentary Hearts and Minds unflinchingly confronts the United States' involvement in Vietnam. Using a wealth of sources--from interviews to newsreels to documentary footage of the conflict at home and abroad--Davis constructs a…

This opening of The Story of Film: An Odyssey shows the birth of a great new art form, the movies. Filmed in the very buildings where the first movies were made, it shows that ideas and passion have always driven…

A Trip To The Moon (1902): The material for A Trip to the Moon is sourced from a restored color version that had been considered lost for several decades and is presented with an original soundtrack by the French band,…

A true twentieth-century trailblazer, Harvey Milk was an outspoken human rights activist and one of the first openly gay U.S. politicians elected to public office; even after his assassination in 1978, he continues to inspire disenfranchised people around the world.…

This part of The Story of Film shows how the trauma of war made cinema more daring. The story starts in Italy, and then we go to Hollywood, discover Orson Welles and chart the darkening of American film and the…

Robert Flaherty made this wonderful film of Eskimo (Inuit) life following six years as an Artic explorer for the Canadian Northern Railway. Flaherty seized upon the idea of structuring his movie around characters who reenacted episodes of their lives and…

This is the explosive story of film in the late 50s and 60s. The great movie star Claudia Cardinale talks exclusively about Federico Fellini. In Denmark, Lars Von Trier describes his admiration for Ingmar Bergman, and Bernardo Bertolucci remembers his…